BISR Annual Lecture: No more deaths by welfare: Towards life-affirming infrastructures
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Central
This event will be held in hybrid format. A link to join the event virtually will be sent to attendees who have booked a digital ticket the day before the event.
In-person attendees should go to room 307, Birkbeck Central, Malet Street, London. This is the building opposite Waterstone's bookshop & the entrance is on Malet Street (it is not the Birkbeck main building facing SOAS).
- Speaker: Dr China Mills (City, University of London)
- Chair: Dr Sarah Marks (Birkbeck, University of London)
The Deaths by Welfare Project, at Healing Justice Ldn, investigates deaths linked to the UK’s welfare system, and has been co-created with disabled folks with lived experience of the welfare system. Integral to this work is honouring, uplifting and learning from disabled people’s and bereaved families’ lived experience and resistance.
A core part of the work involves co-creating counter-histories of slow bureaucratic violence that counter the ‘cover story’ of so-called dependency and deservingness - used to justify dismantling social safety nets and divert public resources away from poor people, especially racialized and disabled people. Key to counter-history making has been our creation of a timeline of the slow violence of welfare reform – piecing together evidence (often examined individually) to expose patterns dispersed across time – connections across people’s lives and deaths.
In sharing our ongoing work, we show that disproportionately distributed harm and premature death, targeting racialized, low-income, and disabled populations, is a feature of the (welfare) state, not a bug. By naming this as welfare state violence, we aim to understand the connections across different forms of state violence, building cross-movement solidarity towards life-affirming infrastructures that begin with the truth that no-one is a burden.
Dr China Mills leads the Deaths by Welfare project at Healing justice Ldn. She is also a Senior Lecturer in Public Health at City, University of London; and a member of the Stigma and Poverty design team at Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Dr Sarah Marks researches the history of science, medicine and technology - particularly the psychological disciplines and mental health - from the Cold War to the present, from a transnational and comparative perspective. She is the founding Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health
Resources
- Listen to the Deaths by Welfare podcast (transcript and British sign language available) where we centre the analysis of disabled people with lived experience of the welfare system
- Meet the Deaths by Welfare commissioned artists
- Read a short article on Novara by China on disabled people’s resistance to welfare reform
- Take a scroll through Healing Justice Ldn's rich library of resources
- Check out the work of Disability News Service – the UK’s only news agency specialising in disability issues and led by a disabled person – John Pring, who is the co-creator of the Deaths by Welfare timeline.
This event is organised in partnership between the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research and the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health
Contact name:
Lou Miller
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China Mills
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Dr China Mills leads the Deaths by Welfare project at Healing justice Ldn. She is also a Senior Lecturer in Public Health at City, University of London; and a member of the Stigma and Poverty design team at Joseph Rowntree Foundation.